


Driving through the Dark

by Daftinthehead (intravenusann)



Series: Apocaverse [3]
Category: Electronic Dance Music RPF
Genre: Drug Use, M/M, Zombie Apocalypse, apocaverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-09
Updated: 2015-02-09
Packaged: 2018-03-09 08:38:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3243272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intravenusann/pseuds/Daftinthehead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you’re going through Hell, keep going.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Driving through the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in May 2011.

He doesn’t remember, but it doesn’t bother him much. There’s the Testa, which is sort of like a memory. And there’s beer. If life (or un-life?) requires a purpose, then he stumbles onto one the first time he stops a mugging. And the second. And the third. At first he thinks, with the Testa, a mission, women and wine, he doesn’t want for anything. It wasn’t even something he noticed until it was there. It walked into his life dressed in black and chain-smoking. 

“You’re late,” he’d said, like he already knew him. He seems to expect to, almost, looking at Kavinsky like he’s something familiar that he can’t quite place. Kavinsky recognizes the look, because it’s how he feels on roads that feel familiar but have lost their nostalgic context. Sebastian fits himself so neatly into Kavinsky’s lifestyle of drinking and driving around looking for trouble. It’s as though he’s supposed to be there. 

Kavinsky first found his grave by intentional accident — looking for it without really meaning to find it. Instead of sadness, he finds it pretty boring. It is exactly what he expected. If anything hurts, it’s that he doesn’t know who came and left him flowers. The thought clings to him; telling himself it must have been a pretty girl doesn’t help. The wilted stems and sprays of white flowers gone brown just don’t seem to fit that and he can’t even imagine a face in his mind. 

It’s a rainy night when he’s been drinking that he finds himself there again. This time the vase is empty, collecting water. The beer gets warm and the rain gets cold before he thinks about heading anywhere else. Even then, he wanders aimlessly. This mood is probably what someone else would call maudlin, and it fits him poorly. He doesn’t want to go back to the cheap motel room that Sebastian’s paid for like this, damp and full of useless self-pity. He considers bars as he passes them, but the effort of hiding cold skin and keeping the small, clumsy hands of curious co-eds off his shades seems like a waste of his time.

By the time he gets back he feels more irritated than sad, with an urge to go pick a fight with some lowlife just to shake it out of his system. Almost guiltily, he tries to sneak in, expecting Sebastian to be dead asleep at an hour like this. Instead, he’s sitting and smoking with a tight look about his blank face. He makes some sound and grinds out his cigarette in an ashtray full of butts that stand up like crooked gravestones.

“Where have you been?”

“Nowhere,” he answers. “Why aren’t you asleep?”

“Couldn’t.”

Sebastian stands to tell him, “You look pathetic.”

“Thanks, buddy.”

His arm stretches out toward Kavinsky, an attempt at bridging the open space between them. He shrugs, but moves forward. Expecting something casual with one arm around his shoulders, he starts laughing as Sebastian wraps both arms around him.

He reeks of cigarettes and hugs like an octopus — too tight — but Kavinsky feels relieved somehow. The ridiculousness of his own sadness hits him, as well as the image they must make, two grown ass men hugging like children to shake off fears and worries that stick to them like rainwater and smoke.

“You’re always leaving,” Sebastian mutters into his shoulder.

“Sorry.”

He shifts back slightly in Kavinsky’s arms until they’re looking at each other. Tinted in red and black, Sebastian’s eyes are still strikingly blue and unblinking. He only closes them in the moment before their lips touch.

It is light, soft, warm. Lingering for a moment before pulling away, it doesn’t have to mean anything at all. Sebastian is full of strange quirks. This could just be another.

“I’m going to bed now,” he says.

They go together, so that the warmth of Sebastian’s body soaks into his wherever their skin touches.

He doesn’t worry as much about not remembering after that, for some reason. Rarely thinks about it until they spot a body on the side of the road, left to die like a stray dog. Bleeding and left so long that his hands are yellow with cold, the kid murmurs and stutters to himself.

“Who am I? Who am I? Who are you? What is this?”

Kavinsky looks at Sebastian and there isn’t any question, really, about what to do.

“Take him,” he says. “I’ll cover this.”

There’s blood and dirt all over, smeared across the leather upholstery and ground into the kid’s scalp.

It’s a long while before the kid mumbles something that sounds like, “I think my name is Franck.”

“Nice to meet you,” Kavinsky says, adjusting his hands on the steering wheel. In the rearview, Sebastian is giving him a classic sidelong glance that says, “You’re being weird.”

What he lacks in body heat, he makes up for in personality.

When they start finding monsters, they do a lot more night driving. The Testa is safer, somehow, though it’s a tight fit. There’s something almost like sleep, because he doesn’t really sleep anymore, in watching Sebastian struggle to keep his eyes open while Franck’s head is lolled back against his shoulder.

They travel at night and hunt during the day. Sebastian reads any newspaper they find and jury-rigs the Testa’s radio to listen in on the police radio. Franck listens too and they talk quietly, rolling theories between them while Kavinsky drives. He watches Sebastian try to offer the kid a cigarette over dinner while they talk about a pattern of murders.

“Should we check the morgue?” Franck asks, declining the smoke.

“They won’t tell us anything,” Sebastian answers.

Franck eats like he’s always starving and maybe he is. Sebastian eats like he drinks, because his tastebuds are most likely so deadened that everything tastes like ashes. He picks at his food while they talk about patterns and Franck covers his napkin in morbid scribbles. It feels normal.

The world slowly starts to come unglued, peeling back around its darker edges — Sebastian smokes more, Franck speaks less, Danger shows his face with more and more frequency. But somewhere in that, Kavinsky feels they’ve found some kind of calling. When faced with human beings, there’s something reluctant in the way Sebastian fights. Or, at least, compared to the way he’ll hold a corpse down with a boot against its throat and empty round after round into its mangled face until stiff, dead hands drop from his calf.

At first, he fights barefisted, like a brawler, but when Sebastian comes back one night with a briefcase full of guns he accepts one, just in case. Eventually he takes Franck’s as well, because Danger is always there under the skin, feeding on Franck’s growing paranoia. He hears him talking to himself at times, quietly.

“Stop it, just, stop saying that.”

“No.”

“You’re sick.”

“I don’t… No, I don’t. Shut up, fuck, shut up.”

Some days Kavinsky swears he can hear the whispers between Franck’s protests.

But Danger is important, able to slip through shadows in the day as easily as the grey-darkness of a night full of streetlamps. It sniffs out bigger monsters and drags them out of dark alleys with the claws of Franck’s hands. It’s impressive to watch, that pitch blackness digging into some twisted body, clawing the creature out of the belly of a possessed man and tearing it apart with needle-sharp teeth. Kavinsky feels a certain rush watching that shit, but he still tries to keep himself between Sebastian and Danger as much as he can.

It becomes instinctive to step between Sebastian and anything too menacing. It’s not that he doesn’t trust the man will make every shot he takes. It’s just that he can’t be stitched up as nicely as Kavinsky can, his wounds won’t just seal over with pitch like Franck’s do. Eventually they, all four of them, move like something coherent. Franck is always at the front, keeping Danger on as tight a leash as he can manage, it seems, from the focused level of destruction he brings.

Gore flies wherever Danger reaches out with its dark limbs and Sebastian keeps a steady beat of gunfire punctuated by the click of a replacement magazine. Sometimes Kavinsky shoots things, but he prefers the feeling of caving something’s skull in with his fist.

There are dumb creatures that even Sebastian is willing to face at close range. Their black saliva is dangerous, but they’re slow and stupid bags of infected flesh. Danger’s efforts with them seem almost bored, poking claws through their heads and hearts without excess movement.

They give softly, their flesh wet and their bones brittle, when Kavinsky hits them.

But there are fast corpses that scream like they’re being tortured and half-living things with mutilated human faces. Broken teeth and open sores across their features, they make eye contact and fight harder when they’re losing. Those frighten him the most, more than the abominations that Danger sniffs out that wear human flesh like a cheap suit or the hulking things they start to find that look like skinned animals.

“It’s spreading,” Sebastian says.

“No,” Franck points out. “It’s evolving and it’s bringing out new things, worse things.”

Kavinsky still hasn’t seen anything, though, that is any weirder than the three of them. So far, at least. It’s kind of a relief.

And there’s still always time for a drink.

They sit on the side of the road and watch the sun make shadows of an autumn forest. Cold beer and warm vodka that they make Franck feel obligated to share, until he’s slurring. He falls asleep leaning on Kavinsky’s shoulder and Sebastian gives him a nudge so that he falls into his lap.

“What was that?”

“I couldn’t reach the bottle,” Sebastian says, shrugging.

Kavinsky looks at him over the rim of his shades and hands over the handle.

In his drunken sleep, Franck drools on Kavinsky’s jeans and ends up draping his legs over Sebastian’s lap. They drink until none of that matters and somewhere in the fuzzy warmth that fills his head he realizes that he cares about Franck just as much as he cares about Sebastian. They’re his whole world, the only people he really knows.

“We gotta protect him,” he says out of the blue.

Sebastian makes a little sound like he’s agreeing.

“I mean, I gotta protect both of you, but you—” he slings his arm over Sebastian’s shoulders. “You can take care of yourself.”

“Thanks?” he answers. Kavinsky cranes his head to look at him just to enjoy the way he tries to fight a smile. His cheeks get a bit tight and he purses his lips to keep them from cracking into a grin.

He must be drunker than he thinks he is, because he’d never do this otherwise. Mouth pressed messily against Sebastian’s cheek, he kisses him in a way that is halfway between friendly and inappropriate. One hand moves to Sebastian’s hair as their mouths meet and it’s still friendly, but it’s getting further and further away. 

Some line is crossed when he shifts and suddenly he’s holding Franck’s head in the cup of his other hand, but he honestly doesn’t care. For a moment he pretends that he can keep them safe.

Of course, that illusion of safety is shattered on a daily basis, because this is probably the end of the world. That feeling of control he has when Franck and Sebastian are passed out in what looks like a really uncomfortable tangle in the passenger seat and he’s got the music turned down low and the road straight and flat ahead of him — that’s just a nasty little lie.

It’s been coming for a while, he supposes, but having to put his body between Danger and a bleeding Sebastian is worse than he thought it would be.

“Pull yourself together,” he says, hoping his words will sink into Franck underneath everything.

He’s got more than hope, though, he’s got a gun and he’d let Danger tear him to shreds before he let anything happen to Sebastian. What does that matter anyways? He’d probably survive it. Right now, he’s willing to try anything.

“Danger, let ‘im go,” Kavinsky says. He sounds angry, his voice low and rough in his chest, but it’s fueled on fear and the same stupid recklessness that keeps him going through all of this.

Franck is staring at his bloody hands in horror and Sebastian is pressing his hand to his bleeding shoulder.

Deflated, Kavinsky picks up Sebastian’s gun.

“You’re both useless,” he tells them.

His hands are shaking. There are still things shrieking in the woods. He sees them in a haze of red. Everything is red, then because it’s too dark to see, but he hears the explosion of gunshots and the crack of fragile skulls when they break against old tree trunks. Once it’s quiet, it’s too quiet, because he can hear himself think again. And he doesn’t like it.

Leaning against a tree and lost as all hell, Kavinsky lights a cigarette to clear his head.

“Shit,” he says about halfway through. “They’re gonna kill each other.”

Not literally, of course… probably, but just imagining the silence between them and the twisty, dark pathways of both their heads makes Kavinsky flinch.

“Idiots,” he says, grinding the cigarette out against the heel of his sneaker. “They’d be totally lost without me.”

And him without them.

Admittedly, the last thing that Kavinsky imagines he’ll find when he makes his way back to the Testarossa is Franck sprawled against Sebastian. They’re getting hot and heavy. With each other. In his car. In the Testa. Sebastian’s even got his hands down the back of Franck’s jeans and, damn, if that doesn’t make Kavinsky just a little proud. He wonders who made the first move, but realizes that’s a terrible idea because now he’s way too turned on for anyone’s good.

He knocks on the window. They both jump.

Franck flushes and Sebastian tries his damnedest to look nonchalant, but Kavinsky knows every damn inch of him and can tell it’s bullshit. He’s sweating and having a hard time keeping his hands off Franck. Which is fair, if Kavinsky thought he could get away with it he’d probably never take his hands off either of them. He’s not even a mile before he hears the soft, wet sounds of kissing. He glances at them through the rearview and is thankful for a slow, slow pulse and cold, cold skin because he’d probably bust the button off his damn fly at the sight of Sebastian biting at Franck’s mouth.

“Knock it off,” he tells them.

Then a second thought occurs to him and, well, it’s a little daring, but if Franck gets offended over it, if he’s not interested then… Well, good for Sebastian, right? He’ll live. Or something.

“Save it for somewhere a little more private,” he suggests. “Where I can join too, huh?”

And Franck does let him join, though there are a lot of awkward bumps along the way. It’s not as smooth a fit as Sebastian’s subtle invitation, but he hadn’t expected it to be. In fits of passion, Sebastian’s blue eyes are dark, the pupils blown wide. Darkness crawls down Franck’s skinny body, coats his voice in violence while he begs for the lewdest things. Cold, Kavinsky feels his skin soaking up the warmth of two bodies greedily.

The morning after he kisses both of them, after scrubbing the taste of sex from his mouth, and Franck tastes like darkness and Sebastian tastes like blood. It’s wrong to like that, but it’s too perfect not to.

There aren’t many things in this blank, bleak world he woke up in that Kavinsky would call perfect. The Testarossa, certainly. A well-rolled blunt sealed with Sebastian’s spit. A hard, synth-heavy song that he can dance to when he’s drunk enough for that kind of thing. And this, the two of them, whatever they have, whatever that is. He doesn’t know a lot, just plain doesn’t remember it, but he knows this is as perfect as it gets.


End file.
